I was going for something that looked reasonably real. My goal for this challenge was to make sure I could get use the tools to get the final effect I’d want. It was a lot harder than I expected.
Here’s my final result for this challenge:
Before combing, when the hair is all sticking straight up, I get weird coloring and way too much specular reflection, like this:
I spent many hours trying to get the fur to look like fur, but most of the time it came across too flat, like this, especially in the head:
In order to try to make the fur not look like a solid surface, I played with the number of particles and the number of children. But when I reduced them, the pink skin would show through.
I finally figured out that the Distance setting works a little strangely. My hair length is 0.12. I was trying distance values of 0.06 but it didn’t appear to have any effect. Thinking it might range from 0.00 to 1.00, I tried 0.5, but the hair still laid right against the body. It turns out that the range for Distance looks like it’s from 0 to 10. A value of 3.5 to 4 eventually worked to get the hair puffed away from the body enough.
I hope this helps someone else.